Два противоположных ответа Трампу: федеральные выборы в Канаде 2025 года

А. Финкел (Канада)

Финкел Алвин — почетный профессор истории Университета Атабаска, Атабаска, Альберта, Канада; президент Института истории труда Альберты (Канада).
E-mail: finkel@telusplanet.net

DOI: 10.32608/1010-5557-2025-2025-299-311

---

In Canada’s federal election on April 28, 2025, Canadians split almost evenly among those who want to respond to Trump’s tariffs and threats to annex Canada between those who think the way to resist Trump is to imitate his efforts to remove government from economic planning and leave markets untrammelled, and those who think the way to resist Trump is to double down on federal government economic planning and interventionism to create a more integrated national economy. The regional breakdown favoured the interventionists with most provinces giving the interventionist Liberals more seats than the more market-oriented Conservatives. But, in two provinces, Saskatchewan and Alberta, both highly dependent on oil sales to the United States, the Conservatives proved the overwhelming favourites[1].

If the Trump factor had not been at play, the results of the election would likely have been very different. Indeed, as 2025 opened, there was reason to believe that the election would produce a Conservative landslide across Canada. The last poll reported in 2024, an Angus Reid national poll, showed the Conservatives, led by Pierre Poilievre, in the lead with 45 percent of the vote, followed by the New Democratic Party (NDP) at 21 percent, the Liberals at 16 percent, the Bloc Québécois (BQ) at 11 percent, the Green Party at 3 percent, and the far-right People’s Party of Canada at 1 percent[2]. So, how did the Conservatives blow such a big lead? There are two contrasting ways of answering that question, though they overlap. One, that defenders of Poilievre put forward, is that the Conservatives did not lose support at all. They won 41.3 percent of the vote on April 28, which is almost within the margin of error of the Angus Reid poll. They lost, in their view, because threats from Donald Trump caused a considerable percentage of supporters of the NDP, the Bloc, and the Greens to shift their support to Mark Carney, the new Liberal leader. Carney, in their view, got away with not having to defend the Liberal record and focused instead on his career in private business and as the governor of first the Bank of Canada and then the Bank of England[3]. The view of opponents of Poilievre, and particularly of the parties that lost many voters to the Tories is that opponents of Poilievre largely united behind the new Liberal leader because Trump’s chaotic policies along with his threats to Canadian trade and independence exposed in a clearer light the danger of letting Poilievre become prime minister. In this second view, Carney was not so much being chosen because he could better deal with Trump than because he was NOT Trump-lite whereas Poilievre was[4]. In both views, of course, Donald Trump takes centre stage, though in one view it’s the deemed superiority of Carney over Poilievre as a negotiator with Trump that prevails while in the other view, it is Carney’s perceived policy distance from Trump and Poilievre’s lack of such distance that needs to be emphasized. To the extent that the election has revived so-called Western alienation, it is the latter point of view that is important. Clearly, in Alberta and Saskatchewan, a majority were attracted to Poilievre’s policy orientations that alienated majorities elsewhere in the country.

This article looks first at why the Liberals came back from what looked like a near-death experience in 2024, how the first past the post system in Canada exaggerates regional differences in support for the two biggest parties, and then examine why the Western alienation theory, though grossly exaggerated, seems to have been revived by the result of this election while Quebec sovereignty, for which support seemed to be reviving in 2024, fell to the lowest levels in decades by the time the federal vote was held.

As to why the Liberals were ultimately able to win more seats than the Conservatives, it’s important to note that the percentage of Canadians who vote for small-c conservative parties is rarely a majority. Only in a few elections in the post-World War II period have small-c conservative parties won more votes than a combination of small-l liberal parties, including the Liberals, the NDP, and the Greens. When that has happened it has been in the context of long periods of Liberal rule that have ended when Canadians have decided both that they need a break from Liberal arrogance as the usual ruling party and that the Conservatives are not really offering themselves up so much as a party of small-c conservative principles as an alternative administration to the Liberals[5]. The first of these two conditions certainly applied after 10 years of Liberal rule in 2025 but the latter did not. And so, had the Conservatives actually won, it would have been the first time since the Second World War that a party promising little more than austerity and rule by the market actually won an election in Canada. Arguably we have had both Conservative and Liberal governments in Canada that proved to be austere in the neoliberal age that roughly started with the elections of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the USA. And there are reasons to suspect that Mark Carney will not prove to be particularly progressive[6]. But the Mulroney Conservative government elected in 1984, the Chretien government elected in 1993, and the Harper majority government elected in 2011, while they were certainly neoliberal in orientation, had not won office by promising lean government[7]. So Pierre Poilievre’s forthright embrace of market principles before taking office was something of a novelty in Canada and Poilievre imitated the policies and belligerent style of Donald Trump[8]. Many people who had turned against the Liberals were angry that the cost of living had risen faster than their incomes were rising. Housing costs were a particular sticking point. Bank of Canada increases in interest rates meant to slow down inflation caused mortgage interest rates to rise without having much impact at all on the costs of buying a home. Indeed, developers were building fewer homes and almost no affordable homes. Rents meanwhile were increasing at rates much greater than the rate of overall inflation with particular harm being done to lower-income Canadians who were more likely to be renters than homeowners and for whom housing costs were eating up an increasing portion of their income[9].

The federal Liberal government was not, by any means, solely responsible for the growing affordability crisis. Under the Canadian constitution, civil rights are normally the responsibility of the provincial governments and that has been deemed to include rent controls. Several provinces, including Alberta, have no rent control legislation, and most others have weak rent controls. But both levels of government have been involved in building social housing and in incentivizing private homebuilding. When Justin Trudeau was campaigning to become prime minister in 2015, he called for the federal government to re-engage in housing policy after three decades of limited involvement. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, Liberal governments had provided a great deal of cash to provinces to promote social housing and coop housing. But in the era of neo-liberal policies of governments pulling back from involvement in areas where allegedly the private sector could do the job and save taxpayers money, there was little federal interest in spending on housing for those upon whom the markets might impose hardship with housing or even place on the streets. The provincial governments responded by also pulling out of housing[10]. They also pulled out of proper financing for universities and colleges. The response from the post-secondary sector was to attract foreign students at outrageously high tuition rates to compensate for much lower tuition rates for Canadian citizens but to provide them with few services and certainly no university-built housing. That resulted in foreign students competing with young Canadians for too few apartments during a period when developers believed there was more money in single-family housing and condos than rental housing.

Canadian youth blamed the immigrant students even though many of them doubled or tripled up in often overcrowded, dumpy apartments, rather than the universities that had failed to include housing for these immigrants as part of the package with the tuition or the provincial governments that had put the post-secondary institutions into circumstances where they became rip-off artists in dealing with foreign students. Instead, they blamed the federal government for allowing the population to increase too quickly though, in practice, in Canada, immigration is a joint responsibility of the federal and provincial governments. Conservative provincial governments could have restricted immigration of students or forced postsecondary students to provide housing for this influx of students. Instead, they provided tacit consent to what the universities and colleges were doing so as to limit the demands of these institutions for provincial governments to return to paying the much larger share of post-secondary costs that they had paid in the 1960s and 1970s[11].

Similarly, the Liberal federal government, while it played a big role in expanding the exploitative temporary foreign workers (TFW) program, was less responsible for the violations of labour law protections for the TFWs than the provincial governments. Such violations seemed inevitable thanks to the federal program’s provision that each TFW was tied to a particular employer, who could, without having to give reasons, fire that worker and force them to return home. That led to most TFWs recognizing that if they complained about illegal, unsafe working conditions or employers paying them less than the minimum wage or forcing them to have sex with the employer, they would be shipped home and their families would suffer. But labour conditions are under the jurisdiction of provincial governments for the 90 percent of workers in sectors under provincial government control.

So, if a provincial government was vigilant in making unannounced spot checks of firms with TFWS to ensure that all provincial labour laws were being observed, they could have protected these workers from exploitation. But Canadian workers, rather than blaming employers and provincial governments for lowering labour standards and reducing housing – since TFW employers, like post-secondary institutions, took little or no responsibility for housing their exploited foreign workers-blamed the federal government for having allowed these workers to enter the country in the first place and the workers themselves for being docile and undermining union efforts to improve wages and working conditions. That these TFWs had been placed in a terribly precarious position was ignored[12].

It didn’t help that the TFWs and foreign students were mainly white whereas the Canadian-born workers who were experiencing ever-higher rents and mortgage rates were mainly white. There is a long history of racism in Canada and the shallow reading of many Canadian workers and middle-class people regarding who was causing housing unaffordability and unaffordability more generally was clouded by racist rhetoric which establishment media and many Conservative politicians promoted[13].

The federal Conservative Party blamed Justin Trudeau for the high cost of housing. It claimed that it would force municipalities to build denser, cheaper housing by only providing federal funds to municipalities that moved significantly in that direction. But its main appeal to younger voters was its call to «axe the tax,» that is the carbon tax that the Liberals had imposed and raised several times as an environmental measure, and to cut taxes on the first $56,000 of income by $800. What impact more income in their hands might have on social programs that they benefited from was less of an issue for younger voters than older voters if only because their economic position looked so much less stable than that of established individuals who owned their own homes or had paid off a substantial portion of a mortgage. In any case, the Conservatives pledged not to cut any social programs, though they had vigorously opposed the Liberal plans to create $10 per day daycare in Canada with governments paying the rest of the costs, a dental care program that was a concession to the NDP in order to get their promise to let the government last for a full term of four years, as well as the beginnings of a pharmacare program that was also part of the deal with the NDP.[14] The Liberals blunted the Tory appeal by getting rid of the carbon tax on individuals and promising a tax cut of about half of what the Tories were promising along with promises not to touch any social programs.

The Liberal concessions to Tory promises proved sufficient to allow the Liberals to carry the most seats in all provinces east of Manitoba and to carry British Columbia and win just one seat less than the Conservatives in Manitoba. Distrust of Poilievre as a potential mini-Trump and the belief that the experienced banker, Carney, was the best person to represent Canada in dealings with Trump and to rebuild the Canadian economy if Trump would not relent on tariffs favoured the Liberals in central and eastern Canada as well as two of the western provinces. Their failure to do better in the oil-producing provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan had both historic and immediate causes. A majority in both provinces had long mistrusted the Liberals and the provincial Liberal parties in those two provinces had withered away. In both provinces there were only conservative and NDP members in the legislature. Carney and his people found slim pickings in their effort to field strong candidates in those two provinces where the federal party had few members more than the provincial Liberals. And so, for example, in Edmonton, the party seemed happy to acquire without much vetting the farthest Left NDP MLA (Member of Legislative Assembly) to run in one seat they dropped him when the Conservatives advertised that he had publicly supported Hamas and Hezbollah – and the chief of staff to a former federal Conservative acting leader who made clear that he remained a «fiscal conservative» but trusted Mark Carney’s political and economic acumen[15].

But the bigger problem for the Liberals was that they were viewed as «anti-oil and gas» because of the environmental rules of the Trudeau government. While Carney axed the carbon tax on individuals, he insisted that the tax would continue to apply to industrial polluters including the oil and gas industry. Poilievre called for gutting of all taxes on carbon and called for accelerating approvals for oil and gas projects, including new pipelines, even when they were opposed by Indigenous groups and would incur significant environmental damage. Carney also wanted to speed up energy project approvals. But his reputation as an environmentalist, his favouring of renewables, and his insistence that he would not run roughshod over Indigenous peoples made him seem like another Trudeau to traditional federal Tory voters in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Carney’s winning the election fuelled separatist sentiment in those two provinces.[16] But much of the anger was based on delusions. In 1980 Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals had attempted to impose a NEP (National Energy Policy) that would impose greater Canadian ownership of oil companies and lower prices on oil sold in Canada than abroad. A massive popular campaign by the Progressive Conservative provincial government led to a significant watering down of the NEP within a year. Then an international recession began in 1982 that quickly reduced the international price for oil from $40 a barrel to $8 a barrel. At the time oil from Alberta’s «tarsands» cost a minimum of $18 a barrel for extraction and so the 1980s recession left the oilsands stalled. But, ignoring the sequence of events, Albertans bought a Big Lie story from the Tories and Big Oil that made the NEP responsible for a stagnant economy in Alberta for the rest of the 1980s with high unemployment[17].

The environmental policies of Trudeau Junior looked to many Albertans like the NEP, Second Act. Though the Conservatives had failed to get any new pipelines built, tied down by Indigenous and environmentalist court cases, the Liberals spent $40 billion to enlarge a pipeline to Vancouver that a private consortium had abandoned. But the Conservatives insisted that Liberal policies were holding back investments in several other pipelines and new oilsands energy projects. That was dubious. The provincial conservatives had expected new oilsands projects when they cut corporate taxes in the province from 12 to 8 percent in 2020. But the oil companies, as the government itself admitted, took the money and ran, using the windfall given to them by the Tories on buybacks, increased dividends to shareholders, and investment in out-of-Canada projects where costs of extraction were lower and the quality of oil higher than in the oilsands. With peak oil approaching, the oil companies were not especially keen to spend many billions on new projects in Canadian oil. They were making tens of billions annually from existing projects and did not want to invest that money in new Canadian oil and gas projects. Meanwhile the conservative government of Alberta was blocking renewables projects that had made Alberta in the NDP period the centrepiece of an emerging Canadian renewables industry. In any case, delusionary or not, the Alberta-Saskatchewan mythology about being ripped off by the rest of Canada in terms of the taxes that the rich provinces’ residents paid without getting any thanks in return persisted.

The 2025 election marked the biggest defeat for the social democratic NDP in its 64-year history. The social democratic party had formed a formal alliance with the Liberals to give the latter a majority. The Liberals conceded NDP demands regarding dental care, pharmacare, and to a degree, housing. But as the Liberals lost popularity, the NDP recognized that it was losing votes to the Conservatives of some supporters who wanted to see the back of Justin Trudeau, whom they blamed for rising prices. So, in the fall of 2024, the NDP leader Jagmeet Singh said that his party would soon end its deal with the Liberals, whom he accused of not having fully fulfilled their promises to the NDP. But while the NDP focused on finding candidates for the next election and raising funds, it did little to prepare any kind of vision statement or set of policies that might win back either traditional supporters of new ones. Instead, it focused on warning Canadians about how extreme Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre was, seeming to believe that the NDP was not going to lose votes to the governing Liberals who were in free fall in the polls.

When Trudeau resigned and was replaced by Carney, the NDP seemed unable to pivot, continuing to denounce Poilievre and ignoring the Liberals who were eating more of their lunch than the Conservatives in the post-Trudeau period. Though they spoke vaguely in terms of social housing and coop housing, they were no more willing than the Liberals to try to mobilize the youth vote by calling for a mass program of new social housing that would reduce the values of existing housing. Seniors had come to regard their homes as the major element in their savings for retirement, and no party seemed willing to do anything that would unsettle the age group that had the largest turnout at the polls. But for the NDP, which had won dental care and some pharmacare provisions for seniors, there was little payoff in not offending this group of voters. They were searching for stability and moved massively to the Liberals[18].

The Bloc lost about a third of their seats, holding on to the separatist vote but losing many soft nationalists to the Liberals because that group was most concerned about fighting American tariffs and defending Quebec from Trump’s claims that requirements for American firms to follow Canadian firms and have bilingual labelling of products and publications about products were a form of trade protection. They feared that giving their vote to the BQ might allow Poilievre, whom they did not trust to protect Quebec from the Americans, to win more seats than the Liberals. And so many of them lent their vote to the Liberals[19].

But the final result did not show a unified Canada willing to unite behind a strong leader with the best chance of dealing with Trump and reshaping the Canadian economy to be less dependent upon the US. Instead, it showed a Canada divided by region, generation, gender, and ideology. While those who wanted Canada to become part of the US formed no more than about 10 percent of the population, according to polls, those prepared to make the fight against Trump their main issue accounted for only a slightly higher percentage of Canadians than those prepared to make affordability their main issue. The close final result in the popular vote demonstrated that split focus among the population.